Squatters' rites

Seven floors of abandoned opulence with breathtaking views – the perfect squat. But the squatters are not looking for a home. Young, middle class and disillusioned, they're hedonists looking for space to spread their message of liberty and creativity

On Thursday 11 February, 3,000 revellers descended in numbers normally only seen at festivals to a derelict Mayfair mansion in Park Lane. They had been invited by the party's organisers, CTL (it stands for whatever you want it to: "call the landlord", "come to life"), to sample the high life of decadent parties and seven-storey mansions normally reserved for the very rich. The ensuing chaos reached new heights of madness when the Metropolitan police riot squad turned up and proceeded to charge at the crowd outside before storming the building and chucking the last dregs of excited youth back on to the street.

I had first became involved with CTL and their youthful dreams of rebellion at their last squat, just down the road from the Park Lane mansion, on the seventh floor of the old Reader's Digest building. As a writer and former nomad myself, their lifestyle and values instantly appealed to me. Before I knew it I was being sucked into impromptu jam sessions and long nights spent sipping spirits late into the morning. There was always someone awake wanting to party, make something or just discuss love and life. On an evening out in London it was very easy to find yourself being drawn inevitably towards the squat by the end of the night. Over the very few weeks they occupied it, the squat became a spiritual home to many young musicians and actors.

That night in Mayfair started uneventfully enough. CTL – a 20-or-so-strong collective all aged somewhere between 19 and 24 – had seen that 3,000 people had confirmed their attendance via their Facebook group page, but they weren't sure if so many would really turn up. They set up, sat around talking; someone in a far-off room was playing music. I helped a team of men carry the enormous sound system into the main dance room and then retired to the "bar" (a crazy system where you enter into a raffle at one bar and then supposedly win a drink at the next one, thereby circumventing licensing laws) to attempt to drink it dry before anyone else turned up. The doors only opened at 9.30pm, but by 10.15pm the place was bustling and the organisers were considering closing the doors.

By the time the riot squad turned up the doors were shut and the crowds outside were surging like some kind of vast drunken ocean against them. Excited by the presence of the police, some stupid kids started throwing bottles out of windows, and although they were quickly stopped by organisers and attendees alike, the damage was already done. Instead of protesting crusaders, we became the irresponsible and uncontrollable youth.

Some papers branded the partygoers as "Facebook yobs" bent on troublemaking and destruction. At some point someone mentioned the banks, and the party was painted as an anti-capitalist protest, sparking comparisons with the G20 riots of 1 May last year when police "kettled" more than 5,000 protesters in central London.

Critics of the event have been questioning the legitimacy of its supposed motives: surely if its intention were social change, there are more constructive ways. But what those critics fail to understand is that in a world where the majority of young people feel so disempowered they no longer bother to vote, this party was no protest, merely a nihilistic end in itself. In a time of financial uncertainty and people losing their homes, the event was not a method of reform. It was a cosmic joke on everyone else, heightened by the fact that the building was rumoured to be owned by an Arab tax exile whose property the police immediately turned up to defend against the hordes of taxpayers outside. And who says that kids these days don't have a sense of humour?

It's a misty evening in late January when I am first guided by mobile phone to the new squat in Dunraven Street, Mayfair, where CTL has set up its headquarters. The door is opened by Nims, an ambitious young actor who tells us, with a cheeky grin, to get inside before the security guard at the hotel opposite has a chance to spot us and start "causing trouble". He then proceeds, excitedly, to give us the "guided tour" of their new palace. The building is seven floors of abandoned opulence, as yet mainly unoccupied – they only found it the previous day. It's always amazed me how easily they find empty houses, but apparently once you know what you're looking for, "they're everywhere".

To a 22-year-old like me with very little in the way of material possessions, it seems ridiculous that one person alone could own the place. Walking up a short flight of stairs, you immediately find yourself in a huge open room with immense bay windows at one end (it was soon renamed by the occupants as the "great hall"). At the top of the spiralling staircase you reach the mansion's pièce de résistance – the majestic rooftop view of Marble Arch, where the lights of London stretch out into the inky distance.

Downstairs in a room on the fifth floor, where the initial scouting party has made its base, musicians from two different underground bands – the Future Children and the Mockingbirds – are jamming together, strumming out songs on acoustic guitars. A small but appreciative audience sings along to old favourites and new material. At one point a rapper turns up and adds his unique flavour to the night's entertainment, spitting out words and feelings that resonate through us all. Downstairs in the great hall, a photographer named Sash is doing a photo shoot with a magnetic young woman called Poppy and a friend who, against their eccentric surroundings, look all the more beautiful, laughing and chasing each other through the labyrinth of bedrooms and bathrooms until he runs out of memory on his SLR.

According to CTL's members, the mansion in Mayfair was not just a hedonistic, endless party where kids could trash things with no threat of reprisal. Their initial aims were to give unsigned musicians, writers, actors and other artists a space in which to create and perform, and a way "to influence the collective consciousness and spread a positive message of liberty and possibility to the society in which they found themselves unwillingly stranded". I found their ideals intriguing, if slightly naive. Perhaps secretly I hoped they would turn out to be right.

Like me, the majority of the collective is middle class and educated to high levels; they all have other places they could be. They are not the typically greasy, uneducated and unwashed junkie face of squatting. They aren't homeless either. These are young people disillusioned by the choices society asks them to make. They do not wish to attend universities that, as Nims puts it to me in one conversation, "breed clones with little or no idea of what they want to do, and absolutely no understanding of the word passion". And I understand what he means. I have many friends who have just finished degrees and are now back at home with very little clue as to what they want to do with their lives. They get temp jobs in offices and bars to pay their way, but ultimately they are drifting, waiting eagerly for the release of each weekend and for some kind of meaning to take hold of their lives.

We are the undiscovered generation. With the number of unemployed under-25s rising to almost 1 million this year, and up to 170,000 qualified young people set to miss out on university places next year, as the social constructs around us fail to deliver everything that our educations were supposedly aimed towards, what other choices do we have?

I'm not sure that the squatters are trying to change society (or capitalism) so much as to sidestep the plans that have been laid out for their lives. They seek to pursue their passions with as much abandon as they possibly can – and I can't deny that as a young writer I feel exactly the same. If life is about experiences, then these people are looking for it.

"Society these days is just so methodical," complains one of the collective. The usual channels by which an artist brings their work to the mainstream – record companies, corporate hype machines – are becoming less relevant every day, giving way to a more immediate, DIY method of artistic creation and self-promotion.

It is not the first time such things have been attempted. A few days after the party I find myself in a beautiful square in Vauxhall, south London, surrounded by a luxurious wealth of greenery and an assortment of misplaced Victorian houses. Bonnington Square has become a legend among the squatting community, a real example of making something out of nothing. It has been home to many a musical hero both obscure and infamous: John Lydon, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Happy End all passed through here at some point.

Originally founded by a disparate crew of travelling hippies and wandering anarchists, many from New Zealand, who brought their DIY communal ethos to London in the early 1980s, it soon blossomed into a fully fledged artistic community. The square was originally owned by the Inner London Education Authority, and around the time the squatters arrived had been condemned to be bulldozed into a car park. The squatters fought back to save the square, forming a housing co-operative and eventually buying it from the council.

Thirty years on and the square is as alive as ever, except that there aren't any squats or squatters any more. The co-operative dissolved in the late 1990s and everyone became a homeowner. Many of the houses are now worth in excess of £1m, and there is a communal "pleasure garden" with an exotic mix of bamboo, mimosa and bananas.

"We may have been anti-Thatcherite, but we were definitely the children of Thatcher's regime," says Andrée Wilson, one of the three founding members of the co-operative, when I sit down for coffee in her newly decorated former squat. "None of what we did would have been possible were it not for her." Thatcher's deregulation of the housing market was what made it possible for these people to claim this square as their own.

"Because we'd saved the buildings, we felt free to do whatever we wanted with them," says Wilson, who is now in her 50s. "I painted mine in what I called Australian desert colours, so when it got cold during the winter you were at least visually warm." They soon added a nightclub and a cafe, part of the ethos of making everything as cheap and accessible to the community as possible. "We used to rock. The police were afraid to come down here in the early days," she says, with a wry smile. How different from the helmeted and shielded army that came down to pacify the Mayfair revellers this time.

When asked her opinion of the events that night, Wilson tells me that she thinks it's "fabulous: anything to draw attention to the number of empty buildings in London", but that she sadly has to accept that squatting as she knew it is dead and that perhaps the ethos has died with it. Changes in legislation have ended any incentive for squatters to do what she and her friends did.

Despite there being more empty properties in London than ever before – the figure across the UK is expected to rise to more than 1m this year – it is now impossible for anyone to claim them as a home. This is due to the efficient – and militant – nature of the systems put in place to protect property owners. Squatting is no longer a means to an end, a method by which to find oneself a home. Instead it has become an end in itself: a never-ending party, a fleeting attempt at freedom.

But what this new squatting movement lacks in permanence it makes up for in flexibility and innovation. The readily available technology and social media with which people can distribute art and plan events allows this new generation to be more wide-reaching than Bonnington Square ever could have been. Their music is distributed freely via Myspace. Their photographers can display their portfolios to anyone online. And 3,000 people can be brought together by a few individuals through something as simple as a Facebook group.

Sitting in a pub a few days after the party, I ask the founders of CTL what the future holds for their collective of artists and outcasts. They've already found the next squat and a series of exhibitions is planned (following the success of a previous exhibition held last year in Piccadilly Circus), along with as many jams and gigs as they "can possibly get away with". Nims envisions impromptu scriptwriting sessions where people are "locked in a room for a couple of hours" to devise short plays that will later be acted out and filmed in other parts of the squat. Perhaps most excitingly, CTL wants to go one better than the Park Lane party with a "squat festival", locating and creating a number of squats in a similar area so that exhibitions, gigs, plays and other performances can be held on the same day.

What, ultimately, are the implications? It could mean that the underground no longer has to be a secretive and selective affair accessible to an elite few. The scene could merge with the mainstream and give many unheard artists a new voice. Like-minded people could meet to experience art by anyone and everyone, and all for free. These might sound like pipe dreams, but I wish them luck, and wait in eager anticipation to see what emerges.

As Andy Warhol once said: "Art is anything you can get away with." Let's hope the police can see it the same way.